12 Best Sprout Social Alternatives for 2022

If you have built a brand and have been managing it’s various social media profiles daily, chances of you not having heard about sprout social are close to none. However, let us understand what Sprout Social helps you achieve and how does it do so.

Imagine you have a brand that is growing rapidly. Your brand, as would be natural, has social media presence across all the platforms currently trending in the market from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Considering the number of people engaging on a daily basis, keeping track of all these platforms is an extremely tedious task. That is where management tools like Sprout Social come into play. 

Sprout Social and many others just like it helps you manage all of those accounts at once using a single dashboard. You can see how your tweets as well as Instagram posts are engaging with the customers in the same place. Cool right? There is one drawback to Sprout Social though, which is its exorbitant cost. 

Even the lowest plan would cost you $99 per month. But fret not because we have many other alternatives that you can use for the same. 

There is no best to worst order followed while compiling this list in order to stay as unbiased as possible. I would encourage you to read the characteristics of each of the tools carefully and assess the present and future state of your company before investing in any of the below mentioned tools. 

Top 12 Sprout Social Alternatives

Here is a list of the 12 best alternatives to spice up your social media game:

1. Hootsuite
2. Buffer
3. Agorapulse
4. Zoho Social
5. Meltwater
6. Sprinklr
7. Oktopost
8. NUVI
9. Tailwind
10. Fanbooster
11. Eclincher
12. NapoleonCat.com

In the end, you will also find a few honorary mentions in case none of the above match your style (which is very unlikely).

Let us begin with a detailed explanation of each of these:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another giant when it comes to social media management. They have been in the business since 2008 now, a mere four years after Facebook was formed. It is used by (according to them) more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.

With their recent acquisition of Sparkcentral, one of the leaders in customer care and engagement solutions, they are now well on their way to solidify themselves as the leaders of the social media management business. 

Here are a few of their characteristics:

• Publish content, engage with customers
• Monitor the latest content market trends and how your competitors are doing
• Advertise your content and manage ads on social media handles
• Analyse the engagement with your published content and formulate better strategies 
• Amplify your reach
• Create an impact by combining with Google Analytics for a sharper understanding 
• Gain insights into your posts and engagement using their specially developed tools

Their pricing is as follows:

The minimum plan is ₹1260 per month, which equates to almost $17 at the time of writing this blog. Compared to the $99 of Sprout Social, this is quite a bargain. It works across the following social media profiles – 

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Pinterest

Moving on to the next one, we have Buffer.

Buffer

Another Goliath in the field, Buffer, has been in the business for more than a decade. However, the current(stable) version of the tool has been operational only for the last five years. It boasts of an extremely user friendly layout for you to use and operate. Moreover, the company is extremely small-business friendly. It is touted as the friend of the brand for its plethora of clients, more than 75000 in total.

To add to the list of its wholesomeness, Buffer is often reviewed as an amazing place to work by all of its past and present employees. And you know what they say; a happy employee makes a happy customer. 

Buffer has various characteristics that make it worth your while:

1. The ability to plan, collaborate and publish content efficiently.
2. Ability to create show-stopping reports to mesmerise your boss regarding social media analytics
3. A new feature in the pipeline is the customer engagement feature for Instagram that will allow you to engage with the important comments (based on tags that you set) much faster.
4. Hashtag planner to optimise your use of hashtags according to their relevance.

An important change to look out for in the company is the appointment of the new Chief Product Officer Maria Thomas. Her small business-friendly model just might be what your business needs at the moment.

As for the prices for the various packages, the cheapest one costs around $15 per month which is even cheaper than Hootsuite. Compared to Social Sprout, the most advanced package of Buffer is the same price as the most basic package of Social Sprout. 

 Buffer works across the following social media profiles – 

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Agorapulse

Another interesting platform for you to go with would be Agorapulse. Founded in 2011, Agorapulse offers you various unique features specific only to their platform. It boasts of various big-time clients amongst its portfolio, most notably the health and beauty giant Dove and the Advertising and Marketing giant Ogilvy itself. If an advertising company uses its services, you can be sure of its quality.

They offer solutions for various agencies, large teams and businesses along with customer service and social media marketing. Amongst its many characteristics, the most notable ones are:

1. Sharing Calendar which helps your organise and see your scheduled and previous posts and publishing dates for all platforms in one place. 
2. One-click report generation to share with your team or managers to discuss and finalise the way forward. 
3. Collaboration amongst teammates 
4. The ability to assign different team members drafts based on their expertise.
5. Inbuilt CRM features to help you label and group your various followers based on certain tags.
6. A highly automated inbox to sort out your engagement needs thoroughly.

The website of the company also offers a comparison of its features alongside that of its competitors such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer and more. I would encourage you to go through each of those to understand which management tool you should move forward with considering your company’s needs.  Agorapulse works across the following social media profiles:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

When it comes to pricing, Agorapulse is definitely not cheap. In line with the features it offers, its costs are divided based on the size of your business starting with $80 for medium businesses to $400 for their enterprise clients. Agorapulse may not be the best option if your brand is still relatively small and doesn’t have enough engagement for you to require its many features. In such a case, Buffer might be the best option.

Zoho Social

Zoho is an extremely trusted Indian brand providing software solutions for almost 25 years now. Recently, it has ventured into the social media management field as well with its brand new tool, Zoho Social. The platform has had immaculate ratings across various channels. Zoho Special, like most social media management tools, boasts of a variety of features that are worth mentioning:

1. One place calendar to get a quick overview of your content across all platforms.
2. An engaging list of resources that you can use in order to understand the platform and its various applications better along with video libraries, user guides and useful webinars.
3. Publishing, Monitoring, and analysing content at the get-go.
4. The ability to schedule bulk messages is one of the areas that its customers have most enjoyed.
5. ‘Stats’ feature in Zoho provides you with instant live analysis of data across your social media handles to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of social media marketing.
6. Zoho Social is used by individuals as well, and you need not be a branch with very high engagement. 

One of the best things about Zoho is their customer-first mentality developed over years of being a software solutions leader. They provide packages and more that are curated based on the needs of an individual to an agency. 

Being an Indian company, you are in luck as their plans are one of the cheapest of those in the market. Ranging from ₹ 600 for individuals to ₹ 18000 for agencies, there is a wide variety of selection options.

The website of the company also offers comparison of its features alongside that of its competitors such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer and more. We would once again encourage you to go through each of those to make an informed decision. Zoho Social works for the following social media platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google my Business
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Meltwater

Founded in 2001, Meltwater is another important name in this list. One of the oldest social media monitoring tools available, it also caters to a variety of other issues such as PR Solutions, Marketing Solutions, and more. Their easy to use layout enables you to enjoy stress-free life despite handling more than five social media handles at once. Meltwater employs close to 2000 people across 25 countries. 

Meltwater’s USP is the PR solution it offers that helps you take care of brand reputation management, crisis communication, maintaining media relations and more.

To add another feather to their cap, a rather big one at that, the brand has customers of Google, H&M, The Economist, Ogilvy and many more. If Google trusts it, you should too.

Some characteristics of the media monitoring platform are:

1. Monitoring your social media handles 
2. Analyzing the engagements and other statistics to develop more effective branding strategies
3. Social Listening: The ability to keep a metaphorical ear and listen to what is being talked about your brand on social media.

Meltwater works for the following social media platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Sprinklr

Another giant in the software space for web-based analytics, Sprinklr is a pioneer in the field boasting almost $ 10.2 crores net worth at the time of writing this blog. Its entire empire of sorts has been built on providing software and SaaS solutions to businesses since 2009.

The plethora of solutions and services it provides can only be matched by the trust its clients have in the company. The best part about Sprinklr is that it reduces your need to hire different tools for different purposes when it comes to social media management.

With Sprinklr, you would be able to:

1. Engage with all your customers and followers in one place.
2. Use AI-powered engines to deal with incoming messages of new clients while your community managers are busy dealing with existing queries at hand.
3. Support effective social media campaigns using the in-built calendar and publishing services to schedule and post content.
4. Use analytics to check the effectiveness of your business campaigns and rectify and revamp your strategy as necessary.
5. Maintain the same personal touch of your social media presence at scale using its many tools and AI services.

Sprinklr’s USP is its powerful AI engine that enables content creation and deployment with ease and efficiency.

Oktopost

Founded in 2013, Oktopost is one of the new entrants in this list. However, it makes up for its lack of experience by providing an unbelievably smooth user interface. Unlike a few of the companies discussed earlier, Oktopost is strictly a social media management tool with no other service offerings. 

1. Publishing content across multiple platforms together, scheduled as well as live.
2. Employee advocacy tool that helps your employees find a voice of their own and empower them constructively use social media and harness their voices in order to stamp your brand as an employee-friendly brand.
3. Analyse the stats from your marketing strategies to help guide your future plans.
4. Identify and track important leads and store the data for future use.
5. Integrate Oktopost with various marketing platforms such as Marketo, Salesforce, Eloqua, and dozens of others as well.

Trusted by companies such as Panasonic and Atos, Oktopost is really thriving as the next-gen social media management tool. 

One of the best things about Oktopost is the solutions it provides are grouped across various buckets like the size of the company, the field of services provided as well as the use of the platform. It also hosts tonnes of reading material and other resources for you to better understand its use. 

NUVI

Nuvi is another upcoming brand providing SaaS and software support to brands looking for more social media and internet engagement. It provides a range of services starting from social media management to CRM support. Founded in 2012, the platform has eight tools that help your business grow significantly.

NUVI is trusted by a wide array of clients, both large and small. The most notable ones of the lot are the wholesale giant Costco, software company DOMO, doughnut, and coffee house chain Krispy Kreme amongst many others. Some of the important characteristics to look out for in NUVI come in three buckets:

Products

1. Social listening tools that help you gather an intuitive understanding of what the word on the street is about your brand.
2. Develop a strategy and publish content according to the strategy and based on the analytics. 
3. Engage with your consumers through a single medium across various social media sites.
4. A very smoothly functioning mobile app for your social media needs suitable for your hard and fast, always on the go lifestyle.

Services

1. 1. Marketing platform to increase your customer interaction levels.
   2. Single point of contact for all your social media handles.
   3. Real-time analytics of your internet presence to develop your strategy.
   4. Aid your customer experience through various tools and collaborative solutions.

Resources

1. 1. Blogs and Case studies to help you understand what the best solutions would look like for your business problems 
   2. FAQs about the platform for a quick fix for your troubles
   3. News Room to help you stay in touch with the latest innovations in the social media management sector to aid your strategy building. 
   4. Resources on how to turn your data into a strategy

Tailwind

Another new entrant in the market is Tailwind. It is winding its way through the competition with its unique customer-first approach to business. Tailwind, unlike most social media management tools out there, is only for Instagram and Pinterest. Art and craft enthusiasts, as well as culinary experts trying to build a brand, are best suitable for these platforms.

Having to look out for only two social media accounts and develop tools for the same, Tailwind has carved a very clear cut niche for their development. Their speciality helps them give an experience better than the generic tools out there.

There are a lot of characteristics that Tailwind offers which are unique to itself, such as:

1. Pinterest Marketing and Instagram Marketing features enable you to build and develop strategies and deploy targeted posts and ads.
2. Pinterest Reporting and Monitoring trends to help you get a live view of the word on the streets for your brand
3. Instagram scheduling and planner to publish content that relates to the consumers 24/7.
4. Instagram analytics for your posts and stories.  

In their own words, they claim that ‘On average Tailwind members get 1.8x more likes on Instagram & 6.9x more Repins on Pinterest. With clients like Shopify and 700,000 more, trusting it to build and maintain their brands, it just might be true.

Fanbooster

The next on the list is Fanbooster. The unique thing about it is that the platform along with all the social media platforms, supports TikTok as well, which is a huge plus for building a personal brand for influencers all around the world on the rapidly succeeding video sharing application.

Like the others in the list, it also offers a host of other services, including scheduler tools, analytics software, and a mobile application to make your life easier. 

Talking about the pricing for the platform, the base price starts at $49 a month and can hold up to 15 profiles. The pro version lets you manage 80 profiles for $199 a month.

Eclincher

Moving on to the next one, we have Eclincher on the list. An extremely business oriented social media handler, Eclincher offers it services to small and medium sized businesses as well as Enterprises and Agencies.

The tool helps you perform a variety of functions such as the ones mentioned in the image below. Starting from the usual scheduling and publishing of the posts and various forms of content all the way to connect your account to your google drive or dropbox to increase the storage.

Eclincher can be used for these social media platforms: 

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Google My Business

Pricing is quite hefty for eclincher compared to a few other services in the market as discussed above, but they more than make up for it by providing an impeccable social media management tool.

For the basic version, it costs around $59 a month while the agency version costs 219$ a month. Do visit their page for a deeper understanding of all the features shared for each of the versions.

NapoleonCat.com

The last on the list of 12 best Sprout Social alternatives is one of the most interesting ones out there. Something that is quite evident not just from its name, but also the features it offers as well as their pricing model.

Their services extend from the regular social media profile handling and management to maintaining your eCommerce sales on social media as well. It has a customized service offering for influencers which is something that doesn’t necessarily exist in most of the tools shared here.

Talking about features and characteristics, we have some of the usual ones like Social Inbox and Dashboard to view all your stats for various handles. The most important feature the site provides is that of automation to help you increase your sales by developing your customer service experience, streamlining work and save a lot of time which could be put to use in generating leads. 

Trusted by brands like WWF, OLX and AVON, there isn’t much left to add in order to help you build trust for the brand. So, let’s move on to pricing.

Pricing for Napoleon Cat is extremely flexible, which helps you get exactly the number of profiles and users you are looking for and not pay for extra. This means that while in other tools, let’s say there were three plans, 

PLAN A – 10 users – $20

PLAN B – 20 users – $40

PLAN C – 50 users – $100

Now, assume you have 25 employees in your team who would be using the tool. That is 25 individual users. To compensate for this, you would have to take the costliest plan and pay for 25 extra users despite not using them. That is almost a loss of 50$ every month. 

This is not the case with Napoleancat.

Their pricing starts at $21 for the most basic plan which offers you the ability to manage 3 profiles for 1 user. With every additional profile added, the price increases by 3 dollars.For every extra user added, the price increases by $15. Do check it out here to figure out the exact cost  based on your company’s needs and wants.

Conclusion

That is it for now on the best Sprout Social alternatives in the market currently. Do let us know your experiences of working with them in the comments below. For more tech solutions, feel free to browse through the website.